Wednesday, January 4, 2012

What Do We Do Now?

It
is critical that we do something about global climate change and our
unsustainable consumption of many important resources -- because we can
have an affect. We started the ball rolling, and by the same token, we
can work to reverse what we have started. It won't be easy and it will
be painful, but as moral beings we have to try.

Paul Gilding in his book "The Great Disruption" talks about an approximate
time line of 5 or 6 years of status quo before we hit a big tipping
point, and then very aggressive reduction of carbon output over the next
25-30 years, followed by as much carbon sequestration as we can muster.

We need to take the 2C increase very seriously, and we must
not pass ~450ppm or all hell will really break loose. We need to return
back down to <350ppm to avoid the worst effects. The equilibrium we
had for ~650,000 years was ~270ppm.

When and if we can do this,
the world won't be back to what we had, because there is real and
lasting damage to biodiversity, but it will probably settle down.

We and all life forms here in the present are the results of all life that
has come before us. We would not even have oxygen in the air without
plants splitting water in photosynthesis. Each and every molecule in
our bodies has been part of myriad other life forms before, many times over.

We are all connected;To each other, biologicallyTo
the earth, chemicallyTo the rest of the universe atomically ***

Each and
every drop of water has been cycling through life forms, the soil, and
the rocks of this planet -- over and over and over and over again and
again and again... The oxygen carrying iron in our blood came from the
stars. All the gold we have came from supernovas. The soil itself was produced by all of life forms down through the
eons.

This is a balanced and efficient and bountiful cycle.
The carbon we have so blithely thrown up into the atmosphere in less than 2
centuries was packed away underground over a couple of billion years.
We have made a very basic change, and we must take responsibility for
it.

***

A recent study said that 83-95% of ALL daily drives in the USA could be done in a Nissan Leaf.

Can you imagine the day when ~90% of all cars in America are electric? We wouldn't need a military any where near as large as we have now. We would stop spending 1.5 BILLION a DAY on foreign oil. Our carbon output could be 20-25% lower (if I am anywhere close on this?), and the air pollution would be hugely reduced, saving many lives and many people would be far healthier with out it.

We could all have solar PV panels on our roofs and we would save another 20-30% of carbon output because
all the oldest coal plants could be shut down. We can get almost all
out hot water from solar heat vacuum tube collectors, and the most
efficient heat pumps, some being geothermal heat pumps would let us heat
and cool our houses completely carbon free.

We could employ 250,000+ people building and assembling wind turbines and wave power machines, and in a few decades we could get 100% of our electricity from fuel free renewable energy sources. We would lower our carbon output by 80% overall and we would stop killing coal miners and have zero oil spills and not need to devastate the boreal forests of Alberta or dig for uranium around the Grand Canyon, or poison drinking wells with fracking fluid.

If we switched back to farming like we did it 75 years ago, we would not be poisoning the rivers with chemical runoff, not create dead zones in the ocean, and not add nitrous oxide (the results of chemical nitrogen fertilizers!) to the atmosphere, adding to global climate change. We would all be much healthier and all food could be local and fresh and in season and safer and cancer rates would drop and all food would be fully nutritious and have full flavor.

And we would avoid the worst of global climate change. If we can stay below ~450ppm and keep the Antarctic ice sheets frozen and not mess up crop productivity too much, and not cause too many 1,000's of more species to go extinct and not flood our most populous river deltas and low lying coastal plains and only displace a few million people -- then we might just survive the next millennium, and have chance to correct what we have done in the last century and a half.

We would come back into step with the natural cycle of life that has sustained life for millions of years.